The little white dog on the Victor label/Listens long and hard as he is able. It's all in a day's work, whatever plays.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Eschat you not!

Don't you love it when someone writes the article that articulates everything you've been thinking about? Well, Walter Davis just did that for me in his excellent piece on the nature of Christian fundamentalism. Here's a sample:

It is hard to conceive the extent of the contempt for life that informs fundamentalism. As a final example, however, a testimonial to the environmental policies of the Bush Administration, consider the quaint piece of fundamentalist folklore known as "dominion theology." This tenet of the faith was openly professed by former Secretary of the Interior James Watt, the mentor of the current Secretary Gale Norton. Dominion theology holds that the Bible commands us to use up the earth's resources. We glut ourselves not just for capitalist greed but by biblical mandate. Indeed, as the end approaches it is our duty to do so globally since there's little time remaining to complete the job and thereby bring that final day ever closer. Besides, why bother preserving the planet. After the Second Coming none of it is going to matter.Can you belive this "dominion theology" crap? I had no idea!!!And how about this--

Fundamentalism fixates on sex not by accident or divine decree but by the exigencies of immediate experience. Eros is that force which binds us to life as that blessing which can be lived and loved as an end in itself. It is the spontaneity that weds the child to an innocent and unbridled curiosity; the vitality that resists any restraints imposed on the outpouring of an affective embrace of life in all its forms; the ability to experience the natural prior to and free of the ethical, as a matter of fascination and exploration. Eros is that in us which wants to incarnate itself fully, to expend oneself in investing all of one's energies into life. And when all of this becomes overtly sexual it discovers its innermost meaning: to open oneself to another and incarnate in the body the depth of feeling that two subjects can have toward each other. Sexual pleasure is the temple of a holiness that neither wants nor needs other worlds so completely has it found fulfillment in this one. Such an erotic valuation becomes in poets like Whitman and Blake the prime agent of all human perception; it is in Plato the source of noble laws and institutions; and in Freud it is that which pits itself against the forces of death.

His article limns the pathology behind all forms of religious fundamentalism. As I was reading it, I thought: Isn't it tragic that many evangelicals hate the complex, embodied world and themselves with such raw ferocity? Doesn't it say in John 3:16 that "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son..."

It seems some are overlooking what to me are the key words "loved" and "begotten" (the second seeming a gloss of "embodied" to me. It's hard to be embodied, as Jesus would seem to be the first to admit to.

I will try to post a picture of our paperwhites.

They are so joyfully Eros all the way!

I wish all the people who believed in this Rapture codswollop would leave already. Think of all the free stuff that would be left to the reality-based community! We could turn all the Wal-Marts into capybara preserves!